


Gypsy, Ghost and Woman

by stargategeek



Series: His Beautiful Ghost [1]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Aberama has feels, F/M, Forest frolicking, Pre-Season 5, Smut, Unrequited Love, but sorta requited, sexy ghost talk, why Aberama gets a hair cut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 02:10:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20556497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stargategeek/pseuds/stargategeek
Summary: They only made love the once, and he was utterly haunted by her.





	Gypsy, Ghost and Woman

They only made love the once, and he was utterly haunted by her.

Her willowy hands stole under his thick long coat. 

“You don’t need this.”

And just like that she peeled away another one of his barriers. Just like the ghost that haunted him before her. The young romany girl with raven hair and sharp eyes and a wicked tongue he had hoped to die very very old with. The one he still sees in the features of his pride and joy, his Bonnie. 

But for once she was not here, not in the back of his mind, whispering darkly into his ear. Now he was utterly consumed with a much more tangible phantom. A kin spirit. The same oneness with nature and the old ways, the same childhood in the caravan, and the ruddy vein of violence that shot through the core. And yet here, she was warm, and soft, nestled amongst the fallen leaves, smelling of a dark musky perfume that every so often changed with a hint of spice. Both artificial and achingly real.

Her pickpocketing hands stole again. Stole the buttons of his vest from their holes, stole the tails of his shirt from the safe places tucked into his trousers, stole underneath the layers to touch his skin. 

“Take off that hat,” she growled and bit his ear.

He complied. Another barrier.

Then she stole into his hair. 

“You don’t need this,” she whispered.

He ground himself helplessly into her stockinged leg. 

She clutched the long soft ends of his hair. Fingered the greying strands, interlaced them with those greedy greedy witches hands. She grabbed a handful and yanked. Pulling the curtain back from his face, exposing him. 

She exhaled, and it could’ve been ecstasy. Those sharp eyes caught on the strained lines of his brow, the beading sweat along his hairline, the way his lips fell upon, pursed and drawn towards her. She leaned forward and they kissed. It was like sucking on pure air, kissing her. Beyond the lingering taste of whiskey and tinge of her last cigarette. She tasted pure. Like stream water and spring dew. Like the first taste of snow. Cold, but not unfeeling.

This is how she liked her men. Entranced. She gather up his hair in bigger handfuls and squeezed till the scalp started to burn.

“I want to feel you, I want to feel all of you.”

He sat up on his haunches and flung off the sticky remains of his shirt and vest. Forgot them on the forest floor. Whatever she commanded he would do.

His hands came to the suspenders on his trousers and those fingers reached out and stilled him.

“Let me.”

He acquiesced wholeheartedly, dropping his hands.

The barriers just kept coming down.

Agonizingly slowly she lowered one strap over his narrow shoulder, admiring the pink edge of an old scar. A knifing he had walked away from - not so lucky for the guy what knifed him. 

Her devilish painted fingertips skirted down the bare flesh of his arm all the way down to his bloodstained hands. The blood of necessity - perhaps a little of pleasure. She meant down and kissed his shoulder, his scar, like she owned it. Like she owned him, body and soul.

She lowered the second strap, and repeated her actions. As though she were placing a spell on him through this ritual. Perhaps she was, she was entirely capable of it. When she leaned into kiss him she bit, hard. The fleshy junction between neck and shoulder. She embedded her teeth there until they left an indelible mark that if he thought about it he could still feel. 

She pulled away again. Watched the way his breath heaved in his chest. The glint of the totem around his through through the mating of dark chest hair peeking out the top of his undershirt. He was grey, but not old, certainly not old. He had the figure and vigour of a man twenty years his junior. 

She admired him. Admired the layers she had robbed him of. His almost nakedness.

“You’ve had too many boys,” he rasps. His eyes flicked from his own body to hers. There is that smile in her eyes. 

“It’s about time you’ve let yourself have a man.”

The smile in her eyes spread to her mouth. 

“I like boys. They’re eager. Willing to do anything to please. What will you do for me?”

It’s his turn to snatch, to rob, to steal. If only a small piece of her. He would not be so deluded to think she was prepared to give him all. Though he wanted it. He wanted her to the core.

Her frilly, feathery, inky black coat fell amongst the leaves somewhere near his hat. He grabbed for that narrow waist, the silky flimsiness of her dress, yanked her to him, on to him. Foisted her with all his strength into his arms. Acutely aware that he was still the one on his knees. There was nothing that he could do to her that she hadn’t already sanctioned. It didn’t matter. She wanted him, if for only in these woods for this moment. 

A leg wrapped around his waist. He kissed her and dug his nails into her thigh.

“Don’t you rip my stockings, ya hear?” she playfully threatened. Her kiss was more of a bite.

“Get them off then. Let me touch you.”

She unwinds from him and comes to standing. First peeling off the scrap of a dress she wears, and the unclipping the top of one stocking from her garter belt. Her legs are the legs of a twenty year old. Smooth, long, creamy, ending in a beautiful arched foot with toenails painted to match her fingers. If she asked him to he would kiss those feet. 

The other stocking rolled down and tossed aside. She stood before him in black lace and garters. More hauntingly beautiful than before.

“Come here,” she commanded, wiggling her finger. 

He does. He crawls. He knows she likes a man on his knees, worshipping. But she does not have to tell him what to do, he knows.

The tops of her feet, the ankle, the calf, the fleshy knob of the knee - all get a pass from his lips and tongue and teeth. Then back down to the feet and the other leg. A nip here, a lick there, an open mouthed kiss to her warm inner thigh. She sighs. He smiles. 

She was not the only once who could steal. He planned to steal a few more sighs from her before they were through. Sighs he would keep as little treasures in the back of his mind, to pull out when the nights were cold and lonely. 

The smell of her is intoxicating. Overpowering. He wants to bury his face in her and drown. He leans forward but she stops him with her bare foot against his chest. He looks at the enticingly naked leg, and what the action exposes just enough for him to catch a glimpse of his fate. He meets her eyes.

“Are you a dog?”

He is tempted to bark. He settles for a small growl. 

“Get on your back.”

He does. Right where he is. Without a thought, dropping his rear into the dirt and the leaves and rolling his spine against the earth. 

The rabbit he caught for her and his knife lay abandoned by their dwindling fire. He watches her as she walks over and picks up the knife. This time he doesn’t even squirm when she brings the blade over him. He wouldn’t flinch if she plunged it straight into his belly and began to play with the blood. He was so much under her spell she could do anything - anything - to him and he would count it a blessing. 

She straddled his hips and rested the tip of his blade against his throat. He could see the thought of killing him flicking across her large hazel eyes. He also sees her think against it for now. She had other uses for him other than as a ghost. To be sure he would haunt her. Linger on the fringes of her reality like a barnacle, or a hungry dog - perhaps he was one after all. 

The blade drops from his throat to the top of his undershirt. She quickly sliced downward - another barrier gone - the shirt parted like the skin of an orange. His firm stomach quivered, his chest expanded, like the undershirt had been a corset and now he was able to properly breath.

The blade was unceremoniously dropped from her hands to the ground beside them, in favour of dragging her fingers down his chest. He groaned.

“When was the last time you’ve done this with a proper woman?”

He laughed. “I’ve never done it with a proper woman.”

She laughs in turn. He leans up to press her to him, grinding their sexes together through the layers still between them. He grabbed at her hips at the expanse of her back, the chilled skin that he could touch. 

“I only fuck gypsies and ghosts,” he rasped against her neck. 

She smiled with a pleasureful moan. 

Claws dragged up his back into his hair, grabbing fistfuls of it. 

“Now you shall have all three. Gypsy, ghost and woman.”

She tugged his hair. 

“I truly hate long hair on a man.”

He smiled. He’s hasn’t cut his hair since his wife passed away. She was the one who had always shorn it to her liking. Sitting on his lap not unlike the way this woman sat on it now. A sensual experience that probably produced a third of their children. The hair was a sign of his loyalty to her, to her memory, his mourning clothes.

He leaned back to look at this woman, his new ghost - with her sultry eyes and hard crystalline features. 

“For you, I just might cut it.”

She leant back and laughed, bringing their pelvises more tightly together. When she returned to him her face had changed once more. The time for talk was over. She reached between them and palmed him through the thick material of his trousers.

“I want you to fuck me out here, in these woods. Fuck me so hard, you’ll never forget it.”

It didn’t escape his notice how she said he’d never forget it. Not that he was likely to at any rate. She already knew him to the bare bones of him. He wanted so much just to have a scrap of her.

“Well, unbuckle me, and I will,” he bit her ear lobe. 

She tilted his chin to hers and they kissed. Her tongue slid between his teeth just as her hand slithered between their bodies to the front of his trousers. The click of the buckle opening and the pop of the button, and a few shifts of their person and he was pressed to the naked heat of her. They kissed ravenously. He could go on being consumed by her for all time. Willingly let himself be fed upon by this ghost - this woman. She took life and gave life anew. It’s what made him want her before he even realized he wanted her. When all he’d known was a name, and her reputation. The matriarch of the most powerful family in Birmingham. He wanted her, and she had chosen him. 

He pulled back, hands coming to her hips to hold her just on the precipice, before she sank down and consumed him forever. 

“Polly...” he sighed.

Her finger pressed against his lips, stilling whatever confession was about to slip forth.

“Just get lost in the woods with me.”

He nodded and she sank, and he saw fucking fireworks. 

When he came to she was riding him like a prize thoroughbred. 4/1, straight out the gate. The fading afternoon sun dappled against her glistening damp bosom - nothing has ever been so beautiful or would be again he was sure. 

She had the type of body that could milk a man for all he was worth, and she was siphoning the very soul of him through her cunt. The pace was steady but brutal, and punctuated by the silence of nature around them. The faint rustle of the wind in the trees and a loon calling off the lake. 

He grunted to fill the silence. So that the trees would remember this acquiescence even if she did not. The woods would remember the day she made him hers. The day she re-sculpted him to her liking. He fell into the leaves taking her with him, opening her wider so that he could piston - no longer like a horse but like a train engine. She moaned gratefully, just for him. A small gift for him to keep. 

He hadn’t fucked this furiously since the night he conceived Bonnie, when he was young and in love, and she wanted him and he let her have him, all of him, for as long as she wanted it. 

Unused muscles strained and pulled. His lower back protested both the hardness of the ground, and the punishing pace. He would not be shown up by the next vigorous youth to be devoured by Polly Gray. He would leave his mark. 

He pulled out suddenly and spun them over, pressing her into the ground and pinning her hands, palm flat against the earth, she moaned again. Approval.

Her arse ground against his crotch, and her back arched to welcome him in. Her face pressed against the cool ground, eyes closed in her heathen bliss. He slowed down, demonstratively. Her knee was hiked up to the side of her body to grant him better access and he kissed her neck and bit her exposed shoulder whilst he fell into her once again. His hands slid over the tops of her hands and embedded between her fingers. Not quite intertwined but there, and willing. 

Let me intertwine with you.

He groaned loud enough for her to hear. 

“Speak to me,” she sighed.

He didn’t have to ask her what she wanted. Never was he known to be a great talker, especially in intimate moments, but it all came from him like a burst dam. Streams of praises and curses and filth and poetry, and exclamations and exultations all in their native tongue. He cursed her and cursed himself, prayed for her and to her, called her whore and angel, woman and ghost, all whilst pounding their bodies into the sodden earth. Dust to dust. Ash to ash. Bone to bone.

At some point she turned on him, at no point breaking their connection and she wrapped herself around him like ivy, and when he slammed himself inside her she cried out, loud enough to startle the crowd in the trees. She kissed him and sucked up whatever of him was left to have. The last barrier gone; he was a newborn to her, completely naked and hers. 

“Oh fuck,” she cried.

“Let me...” he grunted into her ear. “Let me bring you back...let me bring you back to the living...my ghost...” he kissed her, touched his forehead to hers. Catching her moist breath upon his cheeks so he could hear every little shift of breath so he could know. Know when she was close.

She looked up, beyond him. To the fading sky. A new night, the death of day. Sweet, peaceful death in the arms of the most unsuitable man. She longed for the death, just as he did, and with a soft rumble that robbed him once more of sense, she died, soundlessly and with great power. He felt every ripple of it come from her body into his and then back again. 

He pulled back just enough to see her face. Her eyes closed in peaceful pleasure, her lips pulled back to an exquisitely satisfied smile. The sight of it, and the knowledge that he had done it brought him careening to his end.

It took a moment for him to recover. By the time his breath stabilized and his brain started functioning again she had already left him and was back tending to the fire and their rabbit. He turned over to watch her work allowing the silence to pervade and sweeten the atmosphere.

“It’s not gone off, has it?” He asked in reference to the buck in her hands.

She smiled, cheekily. 

“No, it’s perfect.”

He pressed his lips together causing them to pucker slightly. 

She skinned the thing and effortlessly whittled a stick down to a pointed end and skewered the carcass on to it. Their dinner roasting over the fire, the early evening haze was beginning to settle, she gave a slight shiver. 

He stood, buckling up his pants and tugging the suspenders straps over his bare torso. Their clothes lay strewn about but he didn’t mind. It created a pleasing tableaux of their afternoon together. The only thing he grabbed of the ground was his thick heavy coat. He brought it over to where she was sitting and placed it at her feet. 

Without a word, or asking for permission, he sat himself behind her and eased himself down to his side, tugging her to him and tucking her in against his chest. The rabbit would take a while to cook and then they would eat it, until then it was silently acknowledged that she was his and he could revel in the intimacy, in the closeness of her for as long as she would allow. 

He pillowed her head against his arm and brought his coat over them like a blanket, and they lay and watched the fire. 

“Thank you for the afternoon,” she murmured contentedly.

He didn’t say anything, but grinned to himself and softly kissed her neck. 

This was how it should be, he thought. Living off the land, sleeping by the light of the moon and fucking in the leaves. 

“Stay a little. Rest.”

She nodded against him, snuggling further against him. 

When the rabbit was cooked they ate, when the moon came out they slept, and when he awoke in the morning his ghost was already gone. 

~~~~

He saw her later, amongst the crowd at Bonnie’s victory party. His time with her was up but he can’t help the small linger pull between them when she walks by him and catches his eye. 

Every part of him wants to follow her out of the room, catch her in the hall and tug her into the broom cupboard for one last chance at their connection. One last time to have her wrapped around him.

Now is not the time though. The hand of his beloved victorious boy Bonnie on his shoulder quashes any more thoughts he can have about the woman who has consumed him completely. But if there was ever a love more powerful than his desire for Polly Gray, it was for his son, Bonnie.

~~~~

“I hear you’re leaving us?”

He catches her on the trellis, smoking. It’s a beautiful clear night out tonight.

“I’ve got places to be,” she says vaguely and taps the ashes out over the garden. 

He nods and takes a sip of his whiskey.

“And will you be back?”

She makes a non-committal sigh. “When the next family crisis arises.”

She drags on the cigarette and blows it out in a long steady stream.

“When I’m needed again.”

I need you, he wants to say. 

“You’ll take good care of Tommy for me, won’t you?”

He makes a non-committal shrug of his own.

“He’s fulfilled his promise to my boy, I will uphold my end of the bargain.”

He can’t say that he would do anything Tommy Shelby asks of him, because he would do anything Polly Gray asks of him. His stars were rewritten and now all they say is Polly...Polly...Polly.

She turns to him and smiles.

“Your wife is no longer watching you.”

And he knew. Of course he knew. He had room in his life for only one ghost.

~~~~

“Well I never thought I’d see the day Aberama Gold walked into a Barbershop.”

He takes off his coat and hangs it on the hook.

The men around the shop snicker when he removes his hat. 

“Let’s get this over with.”

He sat in the chair.

The barber was momentarily stunned.

“How would you like it?”

All he can think about is her hand scraping her nails over the back of his skull, touching as much bare skin as possible. 

“Ill get the Peaky Blinder special.”

The men around the room all side-eye each other. 

“Would you like a shave?”

His lips press thoughtfully together. “No.” he says definitively after a moment. 

He would leave something for the ghost of his wife. The rest of him belonged to Polly Gray.


End file.
